I am a ritual girlie. Maybe because I am Jewish. Maybe because I am on the clairvoyant / witchy / intuitive spectrum (although, honestly, I think we all are). Maybe because I’m human, and ritual is often an inevitable way we cope, usher, ground, anchor, transform our daily lives.

My summer was hard. I know this to be the case for a lot of people I know. A lot of people on the planet. A lot of places where the scorching horns of hell engulfed daily existence with an unwanted ritual of famine, or scarcity, or violence, or devastation, or destruction, or even death.

I don’t think death should be a ritual. Nor violence. Nor famine. Nor hell.

But somewhere along the way in the ritual of being human, we began to sacrifice each other, instead of merely—simply, solely, subtly—our hardships, our challenges, and our pains.

I am interested in a kind of ritual that sacrifices the turmoil and tumult from within. By asking the universe—and divinity—to conspire with me to help shift that which lives outside my skin.

This past weekend, I went to the Catskills. It’s the region of New York State that shells a chunk of the Appalachian Mountains. For many it is home. For others, a weekend destination. For others—historically and still—a summer getaway from the density of the New York City streets.

I was there for a wedding. And given the summer I’d just had, a loved one recommend I think of the weekend away in the mountains, in the greenery and lush, in the revelry of extracting myself from the density of the New York City streets—and the density of the challenges my summer compiled on itself both those directly affecting me, and those squandering the world at large—as an opportunity for cleansing. Healing. I decided to let it be a ritual, of sorts. A ritual to let go.

I am often a “hang on the to the past” girlie. Maybe because I have anxiety. Maybe because I have a propensity to take on the lessons of past lives in informing the life I’m living now. Maybe because I’m human, and hanging on to the past is something we are often taught to do.

But it gets exhausting, sometimes, letting my body be a saturated archive, rather than a vessel for not only the present moment in which I am living, but also the future into which I am to step.

As I drove back from the weekend, which was—without a question—nothing short of healing, cleansing (and transformative, to say the least, simply by nature of being the former two)—I thought to myself: Am I being avoidant if I feel like the ritual of this weekend almost erases the existence of the summer I had? Almost pretends as if the past wasn’t really my past?

Or.

Am I allowed to integrate the challenges of this particularly hard summer by seemingly eradicating the daily ritual of the turmoil and tumult I felt the majority of the days of the majority of the past several months because the ritual of a few days was such a potent portal for change?

And the shift doesn’t eradicate, or avoid, or ignore, but rather integrate.

Allow the tumult to have recycled and live somewhere else now, that isn’t inside of me.

I imagine the answer is obviously yes, but as a “hang on to the past” girlie, stepping into the future without feeling the burden of the past can feel foreign. Unknown. It is a dimension into which I don’t often or always allow myself to step. So much of my art is about healing from trauma, or transforming from the past, or celebrating the joys to inform the learning ahead.

The ritual of regurgitating my past over and over—both in my art, and in my conversations with beloveds—is often central to the way I process who and what and why and how and where I am.

But I think I think what that does, is it asks me to live in a when that doesn’t always serve me.

It might inform me, but perhaps also it asks me to stay stuck in some dry soil muck of the before.

Rather than stepping into the lush greenery of the mountain range ahead.

When I arrived home on Sunday evening, I felt invigorated. I did spend a while sitting on my kitchen floor with a stain stick and water and a brush trying to remove the period stain I’d acquired on my pristine white wide-legged Madewell jeans in the final leg of the journey home, but even then, I’d found solace. Peace. I slept through the night in a way I hadn’t in months.

The next day—Monday—I woke up and gave myself a quieter day. I allowed the ritual weekend to metabolize itself. To integrate. To feel the potent powers of the Catskills and the time away.

And yet, by the end of the day on Monday, the day after I got home, my brain and insides felt depleted and defeated and disheveled. Again. Utterly exhausted. Pushed back to the brink of so many of the inner moments and thoughts that made this summer so particularly hard.

I wondered to myself: Could the answer be more ritual? More micro moments of rituals throughout the day, rather than waiting for a seismic ritual to do its shape-shifting work.

More micro ritual moments of gratitude.

More micro ritual moments of listening to my body and powering down my phone and ceasing to work or engage with anyone or anything—or even myself—on a screen as early in the evening as my body—and spirit—actually desire and want and plead and desperately, desperately need.

And also.

Knowing that when we engage with a seismic ritual, sometimes there is residual.

Not regression.

Not backlash.

Just a residual dose of something that didn’t hitch a ride out with the bulk.

For example, my junior year of college, in November 2004, I had a life-altering spiritual experience that led to my committing to fully recovering from a decade-long eating disorder and behaviors of self-harm (as well as other choices to heal from other traumatic events of my past).

Those first few days were intoxicating. Invigorating. I was high on life. Utterly transformed.

And then I went to my Greek and Roman Mythology course that Monday. I went to the bathroom during our class break and popped a pimple on my face. I panicked, feeling like the world was caving in. Feeling like the work I’d just done to commit to my body and the universe and my life in a journey to treat myself with an unprecedented level of love and care after a decade—really more—of all too often treating my body with anything but. It felt like in a matter of seconds, having pushed the puss from the pimple on my face, I’d so too popped whatever spells I’d cast over the weekend (and I’m not kidding, the class was also about ancient magic).

But I remember eventually easing up on myself. Quelling and quieting the panic. Reminding myself that the big internal shift had—in fact—occurred. And while sometimes sure I still pop my pimples or find other ways to disrespect my body or skin, on the whole, I’ve remained fully recovered from the eating disorder and self-harm for almost 21 years now. I think I’m doing ok.

Which is how I learned about the residual. It’s like the final huff and squirt of toothpaste still to come out from the tube, even when we think it’s already finished and polished and tapped.

There is often another extra little breeze.

Another wave.

Another opportunity to witness within ourselves if the thing we’ve just learned is able to stick.

And so the next day—yesterday, Tuesday—I decided to try my heart at the micro rituals.Micro ritual moments for sustained change.

I took a walk to Prospect Park. I live less than a 10-minute walk from Prospect Park. I wasn’t there all summer. Not once. A week-ish ago, I took a walk there. Briefly. Walked in; then out.

But actually sitting down somewhere, reveling in the beauty of the lush and the greenery?

Not once.

But yesterday—Tuesday—as I sat in the grass, my face towards the heating sun, listening to a daily meditation my friend has put together for Elul, the final month in the Hebrew calendar, I thought—as his voice invited me through my headphones to think about the seeds I’d planted and grown the past year—about the seeds. I’ve planted. And also grown. “Tolerance” was a word that came to me right away. Tolerance for each other. Perspectives. Our many worlds.

And then this came to me too: How quiet and soft I am able to be. How loud I so often am. How fierce, resilient, strong. How thick the texture of the heart I often present to the world at large.

But I have been growing my quiet.

I have been growing my soft.

I have been growing how bright—like the sun—my heated warmth can be.

I have always been soft. I have always been warm. That is a thing so many people do know.

But I think there is a softness I keep to and for myself. And the grass. And the sky. And the sun.

And I think part of the reason this summer was so hard was because I had hardened myself against not only myself but also the sun.

I live somewhere where summer is anchored in the brightness of the sun.

But I did not live there this summer.

I did not live there this year.

Nature softens me.

It melts me.

Like the sun.

And so what rituals might I welcome into my daily routine and routines that keep me soft?

For myself.

For my loved ones.

For the world.

I’ve described this summer to many people as such: when I pull back to have a bird’s eye view, I can see how seismic a transition this season was. The dark before the dawn. The dark night of the soul. The dark passageway before stepping through a threshold to a portal to a new arena, world.

It made sense now as I took in the sun that it was dark wherever I was this summer.

That it was absent of the sun. The light.

And yet that is what winter is for.

I often thrive in winter.

I am not afraid of the dark.

And yet to be in the darkness in the height of the light—what a saddling of weight that can be.

And so too, perhaps, a ritual.

The ritual of juxtaposition.

The ritual rite right for me.

Perhaps, then, what I am sacrificing this ritual round is the past. The past, at the altar of my now.

I know that I have integrated and transformed and alchemized plenty of my past. I wouldn’t be who I am and where I am in my body, in my life, in this world if I weren’t already capable of that. And doing it. All the time. For decades. Years. Lifetimes. I do this already. I do.

And yet, I feel a kind of permission budding and brewing inside me to give myself the ritual gift of release. Relinquish. Replenish. Renew. To get to step into the portal of the season ahead.

And leave the summer, leave the past, at the altar of not only the now, but the new.

We are already sacrificing too much.

We have already made a ritual of death.

Rather than a ritual of the gratitude.

A ritual of breath.

I don’t want to sacrifice my future too.

I don’t want to sacrifice my moments of pleasure, when all it takes is a step towards the sun.

I have often sacrificed my joy.

I have often sacrificed my gratitude.

I have often sacrificed both my present and my future instead of my past.

But this season, I take it as a tincture.

This season, I seed my past into the soil for the season ahead, harvested by the micro ritual moments that I will water with gratitude and softness and quiet and the warmth of the sun.

And that doesn’t mean that something has died. That doesn’t mean I am burying my past.

It means I am letting divinity do with it what it must. I am listening, softly, to the sky.

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